Meet Frances Perkins Scholar Nancy Doherty ’05

Nancy
Doherty ’05

This is
the second profile in a yearlong series to celebrate the twenty-fifth
year of the Frances Perkins Program. The FP Program provides
nontraditional-aged students the opportunity to resume—or
in some cases, embark upon—their college educations.

As
a first-year English major at Mount Holyoke in 1966, Nancy Doherty
FP ’05 had already made up her mind to be a writer. She
studied with Elizabeth Green, the legendary professor for whom
the Tower Room in Clapp Laboratory is named. “She inspired
and championed me,” Doherty said. Although she won the
Merrill Prize for Freshman English, her first-year experience
was a mixed one, and a number of factors, including high tuition,
conspired to prevent her return the following fall. “Mount
Holyoke was the right place at the wrong time for me,” she
said. “I was there before the ‘revolution.’ There
were parietals, demerits; the dorms were locked every night.
I’d been allowed so much freedom at home that these restrictions
were hard to take.”

In
2000, after 34 years of writing, editing, traveling, marriage,
and motherhood, Doherty came back to Mount Holyoke as a Frances
Perkins scholar. Both she and the College have changed a lot
since 1966, but Doherty’s passion for writing is stronger
than ever. This spring she is working as a mentor in the Speaking,
Arguing, and Writing Program at the Weissman Center for Leadership
and the Liberal Arts, participating in Poetryfest, and completing
an honors thesis, a book-length memoir titled The Writing on
the Wall. In May she will graduate with a major in English and
minor in Italian literature.

Doherty
can hardly remember a time when her life did not revolve around
writing. “Writing in my family came before cleanliness
and godliness,” she said. Her parents fell in love while
working on their high school newspaper together, and her grandfather,
Eddie Doherty, was one of the leading journalists of his day.
After leaving Mount Holyoke, she moved to New York City in hopes
of pursuing a literary career. She landed a job at Simon and
Schuster, where she worked for two years before moving to Atheneum
Publishers. "It was a thrilling time to be living in New
York,” she said. “As Bob Dylan put it, ‘there
was music in the cafes at night and revolution in the air.’

Doherty
met her eventual husband, the writer Joe McGinniss, at a celebrity-studded
book party at the Warwick Hotel in January 1970. That connection
gave her entrée to many places, including Vietnam, where
she spent four weeks in 1971 working as a photographer, a deeply
affecting experience. “We were ‘in country,’ not
in immediate combat, but there was always a sense of danger from
snipers and landmines,” she recalled. The wrongness of
the war became obvious to her on a gut level. “I looked
around, and everything American, from Coke cans to bomb craters,
looked completely wrong and out of place.”

She
and McGinniss settled in New Jersey in 1970. After a stint freelancing,
she began writing features and taking accompanying photographs
for the Philadelphia Bulletin. “I got to spend time with
a lot of prominent folks—from Senators Bob Dole and Joe
Biden to famed cook James Beard to humorist Art Buchwald. It
was great fun.” When McGinniss got a contract to write
about Alaska in 1976, they spent a year in Anchorage, where she
wrote for the Anchorage Daily News. She won the American Bar
Association Gavel Award and the American Trial Lawyer Association
First Prize in 1977 for a series of pieces she wrote about an
Alaskan pipeline worker who died in jail. Returning to New Jersey,
the couple married, and Doherty took a job as managing editor
for New Jersey Monthly. In 1980 they moved to Williamstown, Massachusetts.
Doherty continued writing and editing, started a portrait photography
business, read manuscripts for Book-of-the-Month Club, and did
community work. But her own work took a backseat to her roles
as mother of two boys and as wife to a controversial writer.

By 1999, Doherty’s personal life was becoming problematic, and she began
to think about returning to school. “More than a degree, I needed a supportive
community where I could get creative work done,” she recalled. “When
a friend suggested I look into Smith College’s Ada Comstock program,
I decided to see whether Mount Holyoke had a similar program. As soon as I
walked onto campus here, I had a visceral feeling, the same one I’d had
when I came for my interview in the ’60s. But this time, I knew it was
the right place at the right time.”

The College has more than fulfilled her expectations. “When I started
as an FP, I hadn’t anticipated all the upheavals in my life—my
marriage breaking up, having to sell my home and leave my community and friends.
I don’t know how I’d have gotten through it all without Mount Holyoke.
It became the reason to get up in the morning and what held me together at
night.” For Doherty, “the most valuable part has been the classroom
experience itself, and the professors who’ve inspired me to work on my
own projects outside the classroom.” She has found inspiration not only
in English classes, but also in subjects such as cultural anthropology. “I
discovered it’s not about remote tribes; it’s about the scales
falling from your eyes so you can see your own culture afresh,” she said.
She also developed a love for Italian literature, which has become her minor. “Writing
a paper in another language is insanely time-consuming,” she said, “but
you’re doubly amazed and relieved when you see the end result. And again,
my teachers have made the struggle rewarding.” She has also taken drawing
classes, and used some of her Vietnam photographs as the subject of her final
drawing project.

Doherty has put her writing and editing experience to good use at the College.
In addition to mentoring in the SAW program, she has worked as a writer and
editor for a number of professors. But mostly she has poured her energies into
course work. “Like a lot of FPs, especially the older ones, I want to
squeeze all I can from every class. Unlike many traditional students, I’m
doing this solely for myself, at my own expense, and I’m not about to
skip class or take shortcuts.” She sees her age working mainly to her
advantage. “I can’t help feeling the teachers are essentially my
peers, so while they may dazzle me with their knowledge, they don’t intimidate
me. I’m comfortable and unselfconscious expressing my views, and my ego
can survive being wrong. In fact, I think my age is only really a drawback
when it comes to recovering from all-nighters.

"As I see it now, that first year at Mount Holyoke, despite my youthful
cynicism at the time, helped focus my ambition and kick-start my career in writing
and publishing,” she said. More than 30 years later, she believes her FP
experience has helped her reclaim a part of herself that got lost along the way. “Not
only have I acquired a large body of knowledge, but my time here has helped me
to believe in myself and my abilities again, and rekindled that old ambition.
I’ve finally gotten the college education I just wasn’t ready for
as a cocky, restless 18-year-old.”